5G promises to deliver improved business success for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) by providing a foundation for increased service innovation, higher revenue, and agility. Together, 5G and edge will drive new complexity and requirements as consumers and enterprises alike demand superior and differentiated services and experiences. However, 5G networks, powered primarily by software, cloud, and programmable technologies, are an order of magnitude more complex than the previous generations of communications networks which largely relied on physical infrastructure. Consequently, to achieve profitability and agility, CSPs not only have to evolve their business models but also must reimagine their operations to manage the increased complexity and drive down operational costs through hyper automation.
The traditionally siloed tools and fractured operations make it difficult to move beyond the manual, swivel chair operations in the era of 5G. A lack of technical agility hinders the ability to exploit the benefits of cloud technology, and a lack of business agility constrains the ability to capitalize on new business models and B2B2X relationships that is required to monetize 5G. In short, traditional telcos must transform to become “techcos”- modern service providers that embrace automation and cloud native technologies to deploy innovative business models and deliver high value differentiated experiences to their customers.
CSPs must automate everything that can be automated to reduce costs, tackle complexity, and exploit emerging business opportunities. This includes the top-down automation where the customer intent is captured during the self-serve ordering process, then modeled and seamlessly implemented in downstream systems from business operations to service operations, to resource operations at the network level. This Intent-based top-down automation is then complemented by closed loop automation facilitated by an end-to-end service automation platform, combining service orchestration, inventory & topology, and service assurance.
Keys to success for increasing profitability and attaining agility
This end-to-end service automation environment forms the foundation for autonomous operations. The new operations platform must offer a top-down self-service based online provisioning and activation capabilities. In essence, the customers whether enterprises or developer communities building applications or solutions, must be able to procure, order, and provision network services on-demand, much like the way they consume IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services today.
As CSPs assess their automation architectures to meet these needs, they should consider the following key solution characteristics:
- Rapid design and intent-based service orchestration: Get products and services to customers faster by orchestrating processes and network configurations across a multi-domain multi-vendor network, as well as automating billing, partner management, supply chain, and service delivery.
- Unified network view: Provide a “single pane of glass” view of network resources and their interdependencies based on accurate discovery and reconciliation, enabling automation of key processes such as orchestration and service impact analysis.
- Automated root cause analysis: Perform rapid detection and root cause analysis of network and service performance issues using an assurance platform that combines fault management, performance monitoring and topology, together with supervised event correlation and unsupervised learning capabilities to assure and deliver superior network experiences and predictive operations.
- Unified topology: Instantly obtain and maintain an accurate and near real time topological view of the inter-relationships between network functions (physical, virtual, and containerized), across the RAN, transport, and core networks to drive automated operations. Enable diverse automation use cases such as virtual triage, root cause analysis, service impact analysis, and inventory enrichment.
Case Study: Verizon is an industry leader in enterprise communications support, and their Managed Network Services are relied upon by Fortune 500 companies across the globe to support distributed networks and dynamic applications. Verizon’s objective was to enable rapid, accurate automation on the path to autonomous operations, stitch together topology data from multiple sources and make that information available with response times within a few seconds. Verizon outlined the importance of a topology that is network driven for accuracy, dynamic in nature and near real-time in operation. In essence, they needed a digital twin of the physical network topology that could quickly highlight recent or planned changes in the network and their impact on customer services. Hear from Verizon as they present at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World.
- Network as a platform: Combine orchestration, inventory, and assurance with standards-based integrations to create an automation platform to drive hyper-automated operations. Abstract underlying network complexities with southbound integrations into domain specific controllers and provide well defined northbound APIs to higher layer business systems as well as external entities such as enterprises and developer ecosystems to enable consumption of network services on demand.
- Cloud native and microservices architecture: Employ modern application development paradigms to achieve benefits such as IT and service agility and granular application scaling. Using Cloud native and microservices architecture combined with CI/CD allows CSPs to not only increase the velocity of service innovation but also sets them up to deploy the application components in multi-cloud environments
- Open standards compliance: Build and/or buy applications that comply with open standards such as TMF Open APIs and TMF Open Digital Architecture (ODA) to enable ease of integration with third party components in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment.
Summary
Modern networks of the 5G era are highly feature rich enabling CSPs to offer differentiated services for consumers and enterprises and providing new avenues to increase revenue. They are also software-driven, cloud-based and programmable, making them highly conducive for achieving higher levels of operations and service agility. On the other hand, these networks are an order of magnitude more complex in comparison to pre-5G era traditional networks. Managing and operating these networks and the new generation 5G services using legacy operations approaches will not only be difficult but also economically unsustainable. CSPs need a hyper-automated operations model to manage this increased complexity, effectively exploit the inherent benefits offered by these modern networks and achieve sustainable operational economics and long-term profitability. This new operations model must use a solution architecture that combines orchestration, inventory and assurance systems in a way that enables closed loop automation of operations processes that have traditionally been siloed and manual. Ultimately, this new operations model will accelerate the transition of telco to techco, and help increase profitability and agility.
